Categories ArchivesMarketing Tactics

Brands looking for new ways too engage customers may find potential in creating branded voice experiences on Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana. You don’t want to miss an opportunity and not enter the voice-enabled world that seems to be evolving every minute. While most marketers will agree that voice-activated smart devices and voice branding are in their infancy, you just can’t deny the explosive growth of this industry over the past couple of years. They have entered the homes of consumers everywhere, with an estimated 64 million U.S. households expected to be equipped with one by end of this year. Voice commands on Alexa are becoming like search on Google. And by 2020 more than half ...

Year-end is often a time for reflection on the past year, along with planning for the new year. So why not marketing? How were results measured? What are specific plans for the year ahead? How can you “shake up” your marketing with a focus on results? Your friends at Modern Marketing Partners have some perspective we’d like to share.

Healthcare marketing efforts throughout the United States remain focused on addressing healthcare literacy in 2019. Large national studies have demonstrated that approximately one third of adult Americans have limited health literacy and describe feeling uncomfortable trying to navigate their medical benefits and the healthcare system. Among younger Americans the percentage is even higher with 56 percent reporting a lack of understanding. Healthcare literacy refers to health literacy, which is an individual’s ability to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. Health insurance literacy is another component of healthcare literacy and represents the capability of people to have the knowledge to choose the best health plans and benefit options to fit their circumstances ...

There’s a sports adage that many coaches tell their athletes, “let the game come to you.” It may seem like odd advice, because most sports-related activities and matches seem to be all about controlling the tempo and taking charge of the game. However, this different and disciplined approach can yield important benefits for players and professionals alike. For marketing professionals in today’s business climate, it means being patient, not passive, just alert and resolute. And it means letting the customer come to you. You still have to entice them of course, but it may be over a longer period of time. How do you establish visibility and credibility with this approach? By creating relevant content that has more in common ...

Personalization in marketing means taking customer segmentation to the next level. It requires tailoring your marketing tactics to deliver the most relevant product, service or experience to the right customer segment at the right time, based on your knowledge of that customer and his or her preferences. That’s a tall order today, because customer touchpoints span across multiple channels including web, social, mobile, and physical locations. So while that makes it tough on the front-end to deliver customized content across all those channels, on the backend it means customers are providing companies with a good deal of information about their preferences and intent. Yet getting at the data from the multiple systems it sits on may be the biggest challenge ...

Businesses are in the business of engaging customers. That requires having your thumb on the pulse of the marketplace and being ready to act at a moment’s notice. It means having a workplace culture that emphasizes flexibility and agility, while understanding the importance of utilizing technology and social media to build relationships and loyalty. Author David Meerman Scott’s book Real-Time Marketing & PR, provides marketers with the impetus to pick up the pace. With use of his examples below, organizations can determine why they need to be ready to respond quickly to unfolding events in today’s online environment, and why it’s sometimes even important to be the first to go there. The Value of Being First Starting the conversation early ...

Product packaging has become more important as changes and challenges continue to reshape how businesses, consumers, and governments deal with sustainability and the shifting demands of ecommerce. Packaging must bridge the crucial connection between consumer trends, behaviors, and values and the innovative role companies must uphold in order to accurately interpret their markets’ unique needs. Packaging today needs to reflect the most forward-looking attitude of a circular society. This year Nestle made an announcement that it plans to make 100 percent of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025. Stating that they believe, “plastic waste is one of the biggest sustainability issues the world faces and that there is a urgent need to minimize the impact of packaging on the ...

In our last blog we discussed how to utilize live video in a company’s marketing mix. Live broadcasting allows for real-time company and customer interaction on social media’s most popular platforms. It may also seem a little scary for a company, especially one who hasn’t done much video creation in the past, to jump into live streaming. So let’s talk about another option companies should consider, thanks to Instagram’s new platform launch over the summer. In June, Instagram introduced IGTV, a new platform that allows companies to upload their phone-captured, long-form (as in up to an hour) videos for their followers to watch. This comes five years after the launch of video on Instagram, which only allows for one-minute videos ...

Marketers’ jobs include a little bit of everything today. Companies are investing in social media, public relations, website and landing pages, advertising, email campaigns, blogging, vlogging, and the list goes on and on. And content creation for all these tactics is a critical component of their success. While technology has driven marketing in new directions, it has also provided marketers and content writers with new digital tools to help simplify their jobs. Today there are boundless apps and tools that didn’t even exist five or 10 years ago. Many of the tools you’re probably currently using may be MailChimp for email list and automation marketing, Hubspot for content creation or Buffer for social media scheduling and replying. However, there are ...

Email marketing remains one of the few media where you can engage with customers who signed up to communicate with you and are truly interested in your company. Reaching an audience who has agreed to receive your messages is becoming more and more rare these days. While social media is a necessary marketing channel, you’re not necessarily reaching people who are always interested in you. This makes email marketing an important tool. A recent State of Email Marketing in 2018 survey report by Clutch looks at how and why companies utilize email communication. Taking a look at the results might help other companies consider objectives that fit their organization as well. Almost three-quarters of businesses across most industries utilize email ...

We are swimming in a sea of information today. Companies are racing to provide content that engages and motivates their audiences. They are also constantly battling to prove their worth to clients, stakeholders, and even funding sources. All the while, statistics show that people are bombarded with up to 10,000 brand messages a day, have an attention span of just eight seconds, and are spending more than half their day consuming media content. It makes it tough to be seen in the marketplace. This is especially true if you need to present numbers and statistics, which often are pretty dull and boring. Into the spotlight steps, infographics, which offer a unique way to tell a visual story through numbers and ...

Last month Google introduced its first new solution, Smart Campaigns, under its Google Ads brand. Aimed specifically at Small Businesses, Smart Campaigns look to automate ad creation, audience targeting, and ad delivery across Google properties. Google’s rebranding efforts of its advertising products beginning last year, stems from the desire to simplify things for marketers. Knowing that many small businesses don’t have large marketing staffs or a tremendous amount of time and resources, Google is looking to create easy digital ad solutions to meet their needs. According to Google’s announcement, Smart Campaigns help small businesses create ads in minutes and connects them with relevant customers to drive real results. Many of you may have tried AdWords Express, launched back in 2011 ...

Influencer marketing continues to grow and gain interest for brands looking to provide relevant content to their audiences. It has become a popular marketing tactic for companies across a variety of industries. That’s because influencers have the ability to share enthusiasm and empathize with consumers in a unique way that helps companies build important relationships. According to Mavrck’s new research the 2018 Influencer Point-of-View Report, the rise of influencer content is noticeable and expected to continue. The nature of social media platforms lends itself to building these types of partnerships to increase word of mouth marketing and lower the cost per customer acquisition. Mavrck’s research sought to get influencers’ perspectives on what motivates them and how they see the current ...

Today’s marketplaces are busy, and information is abundant. Your customers want access to your product and service information quickly and easily. They expect this timely, convenient access starting from their initial search and then once they have moved onto your website as well. Your company’s success depends on ensuring that your organization’s abundance of data is readily available, which is no easy task. A good search tool on your site can help increase customer engagement, increase sale conversions, and mitigate customer service requests. So you need to keep up this aspect of your site to ensure your search tool provides the necessary intelligence visitors expect. Here are three tactics exerts recommend for maintaining a successful search approach on your company ...

If you’ve found direct mail working well for your company, you may be ready to expand your reach and attain more prospects through a rented mailing list. The two overall categories of rented lists are complied lists and response lists. For most businesses response-bases lists will be the way to go. So let’s focus our efforts on what you need to know about this type of list. A rented list is complied of individuals who have responded, inquired, or purchased in the past from a company with similar products and services as yours. There are five overall subcategories for rented lists: Inquiry – these people have responded to an offer maybe viewed on TV, from a display ad, radio announcement ...